


Doubled Pawn

by threewick



Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: Fluff, Kindly Neighberhood Lepidopterist, M/M, Memory Jogging, Reunion, Soft Harry, Sweetness, This was meant to be smut, amnesia harry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-14
Updated: 2017-10-14
Packaged: 2019-01-17 03:45:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12356772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threewick/pseuds/threewick
Summary: “I wish I could remember you, Eggy - Eggsy. I must have been… quite a good man, to deserve your affections. Certainly very lucky.”“Nah,” Eggsy chokes out, clearing his throat as he finally looks up and runs the sleeve of his hoodie along his running nose. Harry flinches in poorly concealed disgust. “Nah, you wasn’t the one who was lucky, Harry. You changed my life. You gave me everything - everything.”-- Or, a more Hartwin re-imagining of Harry's memory coming back to him.





	Doubled Pawn

“Tilde… Tilde, Harry’s back.”

There isn’t much conversation after that. She inhales sharply at the words but doesn’t question them, maintaining her silence for one long, miserable beat as Eggsy stares dazedly through the two-way mirror. Then there are a few falsely-cheery throwaway comments about how this is for the best, really, since she misses Sweden most in the summertime and it will be nice to get home.

Eggsy doesn’t know what to say to that so he says nothing, maintaining a tense, cowardly silence as Tilde speaks for the both of them. He should tell her sorry, that he’s sorry, but he can’t; he isn’t sorry, not for any of it. Selfishly he’d been glad to have Tilde to cling to in the wake of Harry’s death, funneling all of his pent-up emotions into taking care of her, being there for her. Doing for her what he’d never been able to do for Harry. 

Because Harry had died.

Eggys had seen it, had watched his body rip backwards from the gunshot and then collapse to the ground as though someone had cut his strings. And a part of him had died in that moment - a large part of him, an important part of him. Because maybe he couldn’t shoot a fucking dog in the head but he could love Harry Hart, he could love him better than anyone fuckin’ else, and he had been planning on telling Harry that even as he watched him slaughter an entire church full of mostly-innocent people. 

But he hadn’t been able to, because Harry had died.

And yet, here he is. 

“Just… be careful, Eggsy.”

“I will, Til. I’m -” _Sorry._ “ - glad we met.”

The line goes dead and Eggsy is left alone, staring at the man he’d loved and lost, the man who had taken him from nothing and given him everything. The man who doesn’t even remember his fucking name.

Eggsy will just have to remind him.

He steps into the sterile, padded room, not bothering to inventory the new butterflies drawn painstakingly on the walls. Harry glances up at him from where he’s seated on the bed, a mild smile on his face, his hair still ruffled up soft from his forehead in that way that makes him look unnervingly innocent. As though he isn’t a perpetually loaded weapon, as though he had never killed anyone with his bare hands. As though he hadn’t touched Eggsy, pulled him undone and pieced him back together, with the very same.

“Hello, Harry,” Eggsy says gently, his hands in the pockets of his trackies as he looks down at Harry. 

“Yes, hello, Eggy,” Harry responds distractedly, paging through the book on his lap with a singular focus. Eggsy’s stomach clenches at the careless mispronunciation.

“It’s _Eggsy_ ,” he corrects, careful to sound out each syllable much the way he’d done for the goons back in training, back when there’d been an HQ.

“Ah, pardon me. Eggsy,” Harry repeats politely, though he doesn’t bother looking up. It is evident that his impeccable manners and fine breeding won’t allow him to outright _ask_ Eggsy to leave, though his studied disinterest is speaking volumes.

“Harry, let’s talk, yeah? Just for a bit - without the book, Harry, there’s a good man.”

Harry’s expression creases in faint affront as Eggsy coaxes the book out of his hands, though it relaxes slightly as Eggsy makes a deliberate show of dog-earing the page he’d been reading and setting it carefully down onto the padded floor. 

“Well… alright,” Harry concedes doubtfully, as if he has much of a choice. He would’ve, had this been before. He had always had a choice, always had a way out. He never lived by anyone else’s rules, never abided by anyone else’s laws or needs or wants. No one’s except Eggsy’s, anyway. Not for that one night.

Eggsy is thinking about this as he sits down on the bed, slinging a leg over either side and straddling it to better look at Harry. He leans forward onto fisted hands, pressing his knuckles into the soft white sheets, studying the familiar lines of Harry’s face and trying to keep it together.

Because all he wants to do is lose it - it’s too much, it’s all too much. He’d lost his mate, he’d lost his dog. He’d lost his best bloody friend in the world and the best fucking agent among them. And he’d lost Harry, too, only to get him back and feel the crushing disappointment of losing him _again_ \- and Ginger might say it’s a lost cause, might say they’d done everything, but Eggsy can’t give up. He can’t leave, not after he’d been so helpless to do anything for the others. Because Harry is _here_ , and Harry is _his_ , even if he doesn’t remember it yet.

Even if he never remembers it at all.

“What is it you’d like to speak to me about?”

Eggsy hadn’t realized he was staring but Harry’s prim, gently impatient voice brings him back into himself, makes him realize that his eyes are burning with unshed tears and he’s biting down on his lower lip so hard it’s beginning to throb. Harry looks vaguely uncomfortable, his body angled away from Eggsy subtly as though worried he might offend if he is too obvious about it, and fuck if that shouldn’t make it worse but somehow it makes Eggsy _laugh_.

Just a short bark of laughter, hoarse and disbelieving, and Harry startles with it, a frown pinching into the bridge of his nose as he edges a bit further from Eggsy. Wrong move, since Eggsy only laughs harder.

“Oi, mate - calm it down, old man, quit your - your _scootin’_ ,” Eggsy chortles, swiping at his damp eyes with a knuckle.

“I just don’t see what is so amusing about my current condition,” Harry responds, a hint of snappishness to the words as he cast a gloomy glance to the book at their feet. “Seeing as you’re the one claiming that we knew each other-”

“Yeah, we fuckin’ ‘knew’ each other!” Eggsy crows, still half-laughing and still wiping away tears. He puts an emphasis on the word ‘knew,’ causing Harry’s eyes to narrow nearly imperceptibly.

“That’s what’s so bloody hilarious - you, inchin’ away from me like I’m about to swipe your wallet or crease your dressing gown. When I remember distinctly that _you_ couldn’t keep your bloody hands off me, you fuckin’ lech.”

An expression of shocked horror passes over Harry’s face.

“I _beg_ your pardon?” he demands, and Eggsy is still swallowing back giggles, shaking his head at the utter fucking unfairness of it all. The complete, absolute bullshit of it all.

“Yep. We was shaggin’. Alright, no, that’s a lie, we only shagged the once, but it was meant to become a regular thing, you ‘n me.”

Eggsy gestures between the two of them, as though his words weren’t making his point clearly enough, and Harry balks.

“We… What? But why?” Harry demands, clearly mystified and still skeptical. The eye that Eggsy can see has gone very wide, dark and confused, and he feels a twist in his gut for what it is Harry must be going through. For Eggsy has been through some shit, but Harry… Harry can’t even remember who he is.

“Because,” Eggsy says calmly, having gotten a hold on his moment of hysteria, “you were in love with me.”

Alright, it’s a half truth. And… perhaps not exactly the truth. He isn’t entirely sure, since Harry had never outright _said_ he was in love with Eggsy, but Eggsy had read between the lines. And it’s only half of the truth because Eggsy isn’t copping to the fact that the feeling had been very much reciprocated, though he’ll be goddamned if he’s going to tell Harry Hart that he loves him for very first time in a room decorated with hand-drawn fucking _butterflies_.

“I was?”

Harry is peering at him now, still skeptical though there’s something else there too: curiosity.

“Yes. You were.” _I think._

“And… and were you in love with me?”

Eggsy feels a sudden rush of emotion again, remembers inexplicably the suddenness off that gunshot, the way Harry had collapsed uselessly to the ground with no one there to catch him. He squeezes his eyes shut and swallows thickly; inhale slow through the nose, exhale out through the mouth. It’s Roxy’s voice telling him that, and he obeys, repeating it twice before he finally cracks his eyes open again.

When he does, Harry is regarding him differently.

It’s not the shrewd intensity of Harry Hart as Eggsy had known him, but nor is it the childlike sweetness of Harry the lepidopterist. It’s a quiet, patient compassion, a knowing that is evident in the single eye that Eggsy can see - the single one left, he remembers with a nasty lurch of his gut. And it’s so like Harry, that he can lose everything to death except for his careful, studied empathy, and it makes Eggsy drop his face into his hands and exhale a short, dry sob.

He doesn’t mean to cry. He had been planning on upholding his agreement with Merlin: the mission first, and then a single, gentlemanly tear. But he hadn’t known that he’d run into Harry again and it seems impossible to avoid, not when he’s sitting on a bed with Harry who isn’t Harry. Not when it’s Harry’s hand rubbing gentle, soothing circles between his shoulderblades but it somehow doesn’t feel like Harry at all. Not when he’s starting to think that maybe Ginger was right; maybe Harry’s gone to him, lost to him for good.

He would’ve been able to hold it in had it been anyone else. But to see Harry looking at him like that, such an expression of heartfelt sympathy, and not see any recognition behind it...

“I’m sorry,” Harry says, his voice soft and sincere, and Eggsy scrubs the heels of his hands furiously into his eyes. Harry stands, taking a two short paces away, back against the wall, eyeing Eggsy with a sort of muted, uncomfortable sorrow.

 

“I wish I could remember you, Eggy - _Eggsy_. I must have been… quite a good man, to deserve your affections. Certainly very lucky.”

“Nah,” Eggsy chokes out, clearing his throat as he finally looks up and runs the sleeve of his hoodie along his running nose. Harry flinches in poorly concealed disgust. “Nah, you wasn’t the one who was lucky, Harry. You changed my life. You gave me everything - _everything_.”

It’s as though the cork has been sliced off the champagne bottle and the emotions are frothing out of Eggsy, everything he’d wanted to say to Harry but couldn’t, every bit of bone-deep longing and wretched desperation. He’s still got his hands fisted but he’s stood, too, crossed over to Harry to fist them loosely in the sleeve of his dressing gown, clinging to him as though he can simply _pull_ Harry back, draw him out of his own mind and back into now.

“- And I didn’t have shit when I met you, and now… D’you know where my mum is now? She’s in a fucking _townhouse_. Down in downtown London, fancy as you please, with some ludicrous posh sales job. And my sister? She’s in primary school, best one in the area. Got a uniform and everythin’. Dean’s in bloody jail, Merlin has him locked up for fuck knows how long, and I’ve - I’ve got a job. As a _secret agent_. And when I thought you was dead, a fucking _princess_ comforted me, Harry - an amazing woman, who wouldn’t have looked at me twice when I was just some chav pleb. But _you_ did.”

Eggsy’s eyes are dry now, bright and burning, and Harry looks overwhelmed though he hasn’t withdrawn any further. He’s simply staring back at Eggsy, his mouth a tense line, and Eggsy knows the deep brown of his eyes by heart and can hear the sound of his laugh in memory, and maybe just telling Harry how it had been, maybe just reminding him, maybe that had worked. And for a moment - for one shining, fleeting moment - Eggsy thinks that there’s a shift, there’s a glimmer of recognition in that familiar brown eye, and his heart is so heavy and swollen it might give out -

“I’m… I’m sorry, Eggsy,” Harry manages, his own voice terse and overwhelmed but not with any modicum of recognition. 

It’s a punch to the gut and Eggsy’s stomach feels suddenly scooped hollow, everything within him scooped hollow, and he sees it again in his mind’s eye: Harry’s body, jerked backwards and dropped, left on the dirt and gravel to bleed out and forget itself. He feels the same in this moment. His lower lip trembles violently and he squeezes his eyes shut tight, clenching his fists a bit tighter in Harry’s dressing gown and yanking him forward in a fluid, reckless movement.

He moves on instinct, prepared to regret the outcome but not prepared to regret missing his last chance. He tilts his chin upwards, presses up on his toes, and finds Harry’s mouth with his - a last kiss, one last kiss, and then he can go pick up the pieces of it all.

Harry’s mouth is unyielding and hard and it should feel worse, to kiss someone who doesn’t want to kiss you. But despite the changes, despite death, Harry still tastes like Harry, still feels like Harry, and Eggsy will take what he can fucking get, even if it’s a sad, one-sided kiss with a ghost.

Only… it isn’t one-sided.

Eggsy realizes with a shock that sweeps his entire body that Harry is kissing him, too, his mouth softening to Eggsy’s, moving to accommodate him. Eggsy’s heart is pounding so hard he can’t hear anything, much less his own thoughts; there’s a roaring in his ears drowning everything else out, forcing him to focus every sense on the way that Harry Hart is suddenly kissing him, gentle and slow, cautionary and exploratory.

He doesn’t dare believe that it means anything. He doesn’t allow himself to go down that destructive path, unable to further toss his heart into a meat grinder, instead clinging to Harry’s sleeve to tether him to reality as he coaxes Harry’s mouth open with his tongue. Harry lets him; Harry returns it, rolling his tongue languidly against Eggsy’s, kissing him properly and deeply and it’s Harry, everything about it is Harry, and Eggsy’s chest is going to crack open and spill itself all over this clean, white room and stain it bloody. 

He releases only one hand’s worth of shirtsleeve to instead push into Harry’s hair, fingering the short, clean strands with his fingertips as he keeps the kiss, unwilling to break it for fear that it will be Harry but not Harry, that it will simply be this nice lepidopterist who had indulged him a snog. Harry responds in kind, fanning one broad, perfect hand along the side of Eggsy’s face, his thumb resting along Eggsy’s jaw just as it had the last time they’d kissed, the night before he’d died. 

And then Eggsy releases the second fistful of fabric, tentative and terrified, bringing his hand up to cover Harry’s, wanting to keep this moment forever, willing to die, too, if it means he can stay here. That wouldn’t be so bad - a life like this, suspended in unreality, kissing Harry Hart even if it isn’t Harry Hart at all.

And then Harry pulls away.

“Eggsy,” he says quietly, his tone unreadable. Eggsy keeps his eyes closed still, unwilling to give this up yet, unwilling to pop the perfection that had swelled around him for that one shining moment. “Eggsy… Were you really in love with me?”

And that… It’s there. It’s in the words, it’s in his voice. It’s written there, deep and indelible, coloring the words and crisping them at the edges. It’s Harry, it’s his Harry, and Eggsy’s entire body is shivering, wanting so badly to believe it but knowing that he can’t handle it again, he can’t handle any more disappointment. He can’t do it again, to stare into the face of the man he’d loved in quiet for so many months only to see blankness reflected back…

But he does do it, because he has to. He _has_ to.

There’s a single brown eye peering down at him, Harry’s hair still fluffed sweetly up from his forehead like a child’s. And in his gaze is everything.

“Harry,” Eggsy exhales, eyes wide, unwilling to believe it.

“Eggsy,” Harry repeats in a murmur, and then Eggsy buries his sob in Harry’s chest, his arms slung tightly about Harry’s neck, still pushed up onto his toes. 

They stay like that for awhile, holding in each other’s shattered pieces. It isn’t until Harry brushes a kiss to Eggsy’s hairline and repeats his question that Eggsy sobs a muffled laugh into Harry’s chest, shaking his head and mumbling,

“No ‘were’ about it, mate. Don’t think I’ll ever stop.”

“Me neither.”

**Author's Note:**

> I just saw TGC and I just had to funnel my frustrations into something different. This was meant to be smutty but it isn't, though I fully intend on doing some casual smutty nonsense featuring soft-Harry (because the lepidopterist look felled me) if yall are interested! Let me know here or on tumblr, threewickfic. And thanks for reading, yall make fics so fun.


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